Rethinking Arendtian theory

Efforts to address the “woman question” in Arendtian theory started with early works that framed Arendt as overtly hostile to the feminist tradition and “indebted to a culture of masculinity and hero worship” steeped in “androcentrism” and “machismo” (Dietz Reference Dietz and P1994, 231, 243; Pitkin Reference Pitkin1981, 338). A chief area of concern was her “phenomenological essentialism” that divided masculinized politics and the public sphere from the feminized labors of private life, creating a “blind spot” in her thinking when it comes to the experience of individuals caught on the wrong side of the divide (Benhabib Reference Benhabib1993, 104). This structuring cast issues of the body as “pre-political ugliness” best kept out of politics proper (Kristeva Reference Kristeva and Collins2001, 68).

Early disappointment with her overt approach gave way to efforts to identify the value of her thinking for feminist theory. The desire to identify a submerged Arendtian feminism drove efforts to cull conceptual resources from her theory and apply them afresh. For example, Seyla Benhabib found Arendt's associative public sphere provided “an essential beginning point” for a feminist critique of late capitalism (Reference Benhabib1993, 110). Maria Markus found the discussion of belonging surrounding her pariah/parvenu/conscious-pariah categories suggested ways to nuance troublingly monolithic gender identities (Reference Markus1987). Amy Allen argued that Arendtian solidarity offered a way to break the log-jam between essentialist gender identities and fragmented post-identity approaches that threatened to paralyze feminist activism (Reference Allen1999, 98–99, 112). And Kimberly Maslin identified the gender-neutral framing of Arendt's work as a bulwark against developing a “shared victim” status of binary biological identity (Reference Maslin2013b, 586–88).

The reclamation of Arendtian thought was accompanied by continued critique and thinkers like Adrienne Cavarero suggested that her central concept of natality, while rich and powerful, is perplexingly disembodied and demands reconstitution to reach its full potential. The problem may have its roots in political theory itself, which tends to conceive of actors as “universal, homogenous, and orderable subjects” kept “frozen in an immobile presence” by the mind's eye. The urge is therefore to “expel the plural and relational” aspects of politics as theoretically “uncontrollable.” Cavarero finds Arendt's work helps counter this drive by incorporating what others expel: the “undisciplinable” uniqueness that makes “boundlessness and unpredictability” central to politics (Reference Cavarero2002, 508–14). Arendtian theory requires neither a foundational identity nor its resistance, she maintains, but helpfully insists on an understanding of the bonds that form around a unique “someone” with their own face and story. The value of Arendt's work is that it sensitizes us to such uniqueness, which otherwise appears as “disorder and chaos” from the point of view of order-obsessed politics and theory (Cavarero Reference Cavarero2002, 529–30). This feminist reconstitution of the Arendtian body then makes room for new modes of relationality like vulnerability (Söderbäck Reference Söderbäck2018).

Not all such critique proved constructive however, and Mary Dietz identifies a line of feminist theorizing gone wrong she calls the “gynocentric Arendt.” Building on her concept of natality or birth as the primary event in political freedom this approach uses Arendtian theory to center women's experience as birth-givers, projecting a static gender binary into the heart of Arendt's theory (Reference Dietz2002, 127–28). Bonnie Honig, for instance, reads Arendt's thought as “a cycle of anxious repetition” with binary distinctions “heaped, one upon another” (Reference Honig, Butler and Scott1992, 223). But Dietz insists the divide in Arendt's work is tripartite rather than binary. The divide is not the polarized one between feminized household and masculinized agora, but between labor, work, and action. Since Arendtian action, in Dietz's view, remains ungendered it can release theory from an unproductive obsession with “the generic-genderic force of the familiar bifurcation” and can “revivify” a feminism committed to the “spontaneity and unpredictability” of shared action. Like Cavarero, in other words, Dietz finds in Arendt an antidote to the problems of theory itself, because her work destabilizes categories that thinking tends to reify. She explains that the static category of woman “disintegrates” in the flux of Arendtian action and “manifests itself in a multitude of different answers to the question, ‘Who are you?’” (Reference Cavarero2002, 115, 131–32).

This shift from biological or standpoint identity to action, or rather to a contingent identity that is an “epiphenomenon” of action (Borren Reference Borren2013, 201), is a recurring theme in Arendtian commentary. Standpoint feminism may have certain affinities with Arendtian thought including a focus on pluralism and perspective-shifting (Winant Reference Winant1987) but focusing on lives lived or a “unique biography” is still seen as a preferred starting point for emancipatory politics because it avoids the dangers of essentialism and preserves the uniqueness that underpins freedom. If natality is “being thrown into history,” biography is a practice that “preserves and enacts this capacity.” This in turn highlights the way that some figures, by living their story from the margins, “uncover the ambiguities and paradoxes of the norm from which they are excluded” transforming shame and stigma in the process (Locke Reference Locke2007; Zebadúa Yáñez Reference Zebadúa Yáñez2018, 100, 107). Biography also halts the spiral of deconstruction that threatens to leave feminism without an identifiable group for which to advocate. Any given story may be contingent, cohering only via the moment of action, but insofar as the identity it yields up is “a function of audience” it provides a starting point for political conversation and thereby for fresh action (Adams Reference Adams2002, 12). The moral interpretation and perspective-shifting that biography demands combats the corrosive individualism and “numbing behavioralism” that drain away the capacity for political freedom (Drexler Reference Drexler2007, 8–9).

But a focus on action cannot entirely close the gulf between Arendt and feminism and Linda Zerilli cautions that efforts to “normalize” or “rescue” Arendtian theory for feminism should not go too far. Instead, she uses Arendt's work to push back on demands that gender be treated as “the primary, already given category for thinking about the human body.” The value of Arendtian theory for Zerilli lies in its capacity to uncork the unwieldy elements of bodily life, including the “grotesque, mute, oral, desiring and engulfing” qualities that cannot be suppressed or reasoned with through any theory. The potent but tidy distinctions Arendt proposes between labor, work, and action mean that something is still being driven into the margins until the embodied Arendtian subject “haunts the notes and margins of the very text that seeks to exclude or shelter it in a privacy that is dark but also sacred.” She credits Arendt with understanding that this sacredness was connected to the body's role in beginning, a quality that continues to haunt conventional public life and conditions the disclosure of the self. Regrettably, Zerilli believes Arendt's “horror” at “the hermaphroditic body” held in check the more radical implications of her thinking (Reference Zerilli and Honig1995, 174, 177, 184). If so, then revisiting these aspects of her work by looking for the marginal figures and unique biographies that fall beyond Arendt's perspective should be a priority for political theory.

In this spirit Julian Honkasalo suggests that Arendt can be claimed as an ally for queer theory because her work addresses how certain groups become marked for marginalization, shaming, and abuse. When public inclusion means assimilation to the category of “exotic, perverse, repulsive and monstrous,” he explains, Arendtian theory tells us resistance must follow the same lines of demarcation (Reference Honkasalo2014, 184). This is not the familiar heroics of Arendtian history where a recognizable public identity counters an absolute sovereign but rather a struggle between different modes of embodiment with different costs of belonging and action. This new pluralism is not just between different kinds of identity but between different possibilities for action, including the different levels of accessibility or liability that are attached to those who seek entry into the public sphere. The observation changes the stakes of Arendtian feminism because, as Joanne Cutting-Gray observed early in the debate, “a genuine feminist politics of alterity” is one that “responds to all who have shared the historical condition of otherness” and therefore “cannot be limited to feminism” (Reference Cutting-Gray1993, 49). In effect, Arendtian theory means knowing that the “who” in “who are you?” will always turn out to be more than anyone bargained for.

Natality and the beginner

Although central to her theory of freedom, Arendt's concept of beginning is somewhat opaque and her chosen analogies shift from one context to another. This is no accident as she felt some constitutive element of beginning remains unfathomable so that its best representations take the form of a riddle or mirage. Still, there are some identifiable features of her theory that give context to the founding figure.Footnote ⁵ First, beginning manifests as a uniquely human process and the analogy she uses for this is birth. Second, it involves a perceived gap or interruption in time, a disjunction or redirection that changes everything. And third, it is a kind of treasure or inheritance, one that is easily lost and only vaguely remembered, which is why legends or riddles are among the best ways to capture it.

Arendt believed that humans are prepared for political founding because they “appear in the world by virtue of birth” (Reference Arendt1963, 203). Since birth is the continual introduction of new actors into the flow of history, beginning is less an intentional act than it is endemic in the human condition. If the argument stopped there, however, beginning would hardly rise above a raw fact of the natural world and Arendt felt such “necessity” fell below the standard for real politics. Birth may condition humans for political beginning but true natality doesn't emerge until “the new” exceeds natural conditions, signified by a “second birth” as an actor within the political order. While mere biology is insufficient Arendt maintains that this second birth does not require any higher authority than itself because simply to be born is already to be thrown into the process of changing the world. We are “doomed to be free” she says, “by virtue of being born” (Reference Arendt1958, 176; Reference Arendt1963, 191; Reference Arendt1971b, 217).

Although existentially ensured, beginning is still something of an ordeal because it manifests as a gap or pause in ordinary time, an “interval” or “hiatus” where the course of history is suspended and reworked. Virgil's Aeneid captured this experience as a story of exile where the years its hero spends on the high seas symbolize a gap in time between the “no more” of a lost past and the “not yet” that lies ahead (Reference Arendt1968a, 9). The epic therefore communicates the disorientation that a founder must weather. The “thought of an absolute beginning,” she maintained, means “there is nothing left for the ‘beginner’ to hold on to” and the experience thoroughly “abolishes the sequence of temporality” (1971b, 208). In an even more rarified account of beginning, Arendt cited a vignette by Kafka that tells the story of a man named “He” who is beset from fore and aft by adversaries and must stand his ground on a line between the two. The line represents time “broken in the middle” by the presence of the man, and the adversaries represent past and future. Humans spend their lives caught between the inward force of these two foes, she explains, and their fighting keeps the gap of freedom alive. Arendt suggested this is a viable representation for the “thought event” associated with beginning (Reference Arendt1968a, 10–13; Reference Cutting-Gray1971a, 205–9).

There is an important tension between the image of time in Kafka's vignette and the shared and living world where, Arendt said, “gaps in time do not occur.” Kafka's gap is a product of the “thinking ego” where the coherence and unity sought after in solitary reflection is pitched against outward experience (Reference Arendt1971a, 202, 210). Beginning therefore appears in thought as a departure from the normal course of affairs that lasts until ordinary time resumes in a form that resecures the temporal order. This is why the challenge or “riddle” posed by foundation is “how to restart time” (1971b, 214; Frost Reference Frost2021, 135–43). Arendt believed the Romans were particularly adept at this challenge, contextualizing founding in a manner that stabilized and saved it. Because it happens within a given historical setting without being entirely a product of that setting, we could say that Arendtian beginning is in but not of history. This separateness, marked by the disorienting tumble out of historical continuity into the unstructured world of the new, explains why so few authors come close to capturing it.

Because theorizing beginning requires “thinking the unthinkable” (1971b, 208) it leads Arendt into challenging representational territory. As it carries “an element of complete arbitrariness” and “bewildering spontaneity” the understanding of beginning “cannot be inherited and handed down” whole and the concept evokes “haunting obscurity” until “nothing seems so shrouded in darkness and mystery.” The “best we can do in the quandary” she suggests is turn to riddles and legends that preserve its strangeness (Reference Arendt1971b, 202–11; Reference Arendt1968a, 13). For this reason, the “riddle of foundation” can best be understood as a “lost treasure” that surfaces unexpectedly to mesmerize witnesses, who experience it as something abrupt and unexpected. She calls this vision a “fata morgana,” using the term for an ocean mirage that appears and disappears under “mysterious conditions” (Reference Arendt1968a, 4–5). The illusion takes its name from the Arthurian shapeshifter Morgan Le Fay who in turn has roots in the Celtic sovereignty goddess the Morrigan.Footnote ⁶

As this is the first time a feminine term appears in her discussion of beginning it's worth pausing to consider how Arendtian natality is overtly or subtly gendered. There are at least three dimensions where gender shadows her account as it concerns the body, memory or imagination, and mystery. To begin with, political natality rests on biological birth, making the reproductive body a powerful force that threatens the stability of the political order with its powers of change. The body that Arendt associates with such reproduction is primarily female—though not exclusively so as slaves are also assigned to the pre-political realm of the household (Reference Arendt1958, 72).

Beginning subsequently enters politics with figures like Virgil's Aeneas or Kafka's He, or rather their real-life counterparts in Roman and American history. In Arendt's work these are all male. Their stories frame the beginner as someone who, in her words, takes “the initiative upon themselves” and thereby comes face to face with the “burden” of public affairs (Reference Arendt1968a, 4). Kafka's lone fighter is an especially striking character because Arendt insists that political founding arises from promises and constitution-making by small councils or revolutionary groups that conduct what Hannah Pitkin called the “endless palaver in the agora” (Reference Pitkin1981, 336). If the “thought event” of beginning is conceived of as a solitary activity conducted by a “He” against impersonal forces, it suggests there is already something a little off about the way we think about beginning. It lacks both the diversity and the body-count that politics demands. Even if we explain this mismatch as the tension between solitary thought and shared action it poses a problem for Arendt's famous advice that we must “think what we are doing” (Reference Arendt1958, 5). When it comes to political founding either we cannot think what we are doing or, given the stark isolationism of beginning as it is appears in thought, we shouldn't do what we are thinking.

Thinking demands withdrawal from the complexities of lived politics, Arendt believed, so it's hardly surprising that the founding figure encountered in theory or history is a poor shadow of their flesh and blood inspiration. The best one can say for such figures is that, like other artifacts of history and politics, they support the recall of beginning in memory. But if what defines this figure is their struggle, is there any reason they must be a “he?” If the beginner operates beyond traditional categories, why would gender survive where other conventions did not? Thrown out of normal time the beginner finds themselves “visited” by an “apparition of freedom” so that they encounter themselves in their own “nakedness” (Arendt Reference Arendt1968a, 4). If this raw experience is the “lost treasure” she wants us to rediscover, and the founder's persona is like a treasure map pointing the way toward it, misconstruing the gender content of that moment produces a misleading map.

Which brings us to the third appearance of gender in Arendt's work. While both the thought event and history of beginning are figured as male, when it came to the dimensions of beginning that she felt escaped both thought and memory she turns again to the feminine. The “fata morgana” is her image for the “apparition of freedom” that would-be beginners encounter (Reference Arendt1968a, 4–5). It may be sheer coincidence that she chose such imagery, yet she clearly felt the need to fill out her account with something different than her usual male exemplars. When she reached for an emblem to express the riddle or mystery that a beginner must confront, she settled on a shapeshifting feminized illusion. More will be said about this figure in the discussion below. For now, it is fair to say that Arendt's efforts to theorize natality suggest a complex relationship to women as beginners.

Arendtian founders

Before turning to the female founders that Arendt omits it's helpful to consider what makes someone a founder in her account. The classic Arendtian founder comes in two main varieties: ancient Roman and modern American, with the latter inspired by the former. Arendt offered qualified praise for American revolutionaries who confronted the raw experience of the new like few before. In contrast, Romans stabilized their beginnings through cycles of return and restoration, which explains why the Augustan restoration could be narrativized as a repurposed Homeric tale in Virgil's Aeneid.

What distinguished founders like James Madison and Thomas Jefferson for Arendt is that they conceived of the American Revolution as an act of absolute novelty—a “novus ordo saeclorum.” This required them to place their faith in their own untested actions over any other absolute from which authority might be (wrongly) derived, although it took a certain amount of self-deception to make this work, evidenced in their “blind worship” of the early constitution, which provided a reassuring distance from the magnitude of their actions (Reference Arendt1963, 19, 159, 190). The focus on constitution-making is thus a blessing and a curse for the new republic. It was a blessing insofar as it enshrined a collaborative effort at the heart of the American founding that reawakened public happiness and an appreciation for political life. Arendt explained that only the making and keeping of promises can save action from futility, creating stability “in the ocean of future uncertainty.” Covenanting is “the means by which power is kept in existence” so that where “men succeed in keeping intact the power which sprang up between them … they are already in the process of foundation.” This amounts to “the world-building capacity of man” (Reference Arendt1963, 166).

This reverence for the founding and its founders ultimately dimmed the spirit of action. The problem seems to have been that the founding fathers were too concerned with stability until an obsession with permanence reduced the constitution to a hollow exercise. The idea that the actions of beginning “should remain the privilege of the generation of the founders,” Arendt said, has misled thinking ever since (Reference Arendt1963, 117, 166, 224). In this case the American founding fathers are not only reminders of what political action can achieve. They also highlight the dangers of aggrandizing those who conduct it.

Arendt notes that the American founding was heavily indebted to Roman tradition and that its founders “ransacked the archives of antiquity for paradigms to guide their own actions” (Reference Arendt1971b, 204). What they encountered there was a complex mix of tradition, piety, and raw innovation that shaped a figure like Aeneas. The hero of the Aeneid spends the epic as a Trojan refugee sailing the Mediterranean seeking a new home and his many trials show that renewal is hard won. Only Aeneas’ refusal to “stay defeated in defeat” opens a new future (Virgil Reference Fagles2006, 223; Frost Reference Frost2018). By centering “men of action,” Arendt observes, Virgil's work makes clear that founding arises in the arbitrariness of free conduct and the salvation of shared commitment rather than any special constitutional expertise or political wisdom.

Behind all the action, however, is a psychological narrative that echoes the lonely struggle Kafka envisioned. There is a lot less “public happiness” on display in Virgilian founding and the primary theme of the Roman story is the effort to combat despair. Although he travels with a company of refugees, as leader Aeneas must face into “the abyss of nothingness that opens up before any deed” executed outside the normal flow of things, an isolating experience that bespeaks the “perplexity” baked into the experience of beginning (Arendt Reference Arendt1971b, 204–16). Indeed, this most classic of founders ends emotionally dysregulated by his ordeal to the point he slaughters a surrendering rival, embedding not only violence but an outright crime at the origins of the new order. If there is a message about the founding figure here it is a cautionary one. In the end no single figure is sufficient and the war of conquest Aeneas all but single-handedly conducts ends with the arrival of mutuality in the form of new laws and treaties.

Arendt never addressed Aeneas’ role as an icon of founding violence, and she gives little if any consideration to the responsibilities of American founders as slave owners who willingly institutionalized an inhumanity.Footnote ⁷ In this regard there is a certain difficulty surrounding the founding figure that she seems reluctant to unpack. Yet Arendt did acknowledge that foundation legends testify to a deep connection with violence. Referring to the Cain and Abel story she says, “whatever political organization men have achieved has its origins in crime.” Adding: “no beginning could be made without using violence, without violating” (Reference Arendt1963, 10). If crime is not a disqualifier for the founding figure, do they really deserve the special attention her work affords them?

To put it another way, with plurality secured by birth and natality, and promises grounded in mutuality, does an individual founder matter at all? Arendt's discussion of these figures suggests the best of them arrive at the task ill-prepared and are frequently over-awed by their experience. Their understandable anxieties drive them to focus on stability, occasionally to a fault. Moreover, the heroism and happiness she considers the rewards of political life are only part of the story, as violence touches all beginnings. There is something instructive about these figures all the same. Because while beginning may be impossible to retain in mind, the beginner is not, and their successes and failures are often the best guide we have available. There is a sweet spot to the work of founding it appears, and it is navigated through the founder's own persona. Too little stability and the temporal exile of the new becomes unbearable, leading to the anguish and evasion that Aeneas and the American founders displayed. Too much, and beginning is extinguished in the pursuit of single-minded ideology of the kind that led the French Revolution into disaster.

The significance of founders therefore doesn't lie in their individual greatness. These men, “taken by themselves, are not wise” Arendt says, even if “their common purpose is wisdom.” We pay special attention to the founder because their story serves as an “artifact” of actions that otherwise prove fleeting (Reference Arendt1958, 8, 173; Reference Arendt1963, 219). The figure of the founder is a memory device in which we store something rare and precious: the experience of unmitigated freedom and the capacity to build the new together. These figures constitute what Nietzsche called “monumental” history, reminding us that the great was “once possible, and may thus be possible again” (Reference Nietzsche, Breazeale and Hollingdale1997, 69). Since the intention is not to over-awe later generations with a glorious past but to point the way to something valuable, the single most important quality of the founding figure is their capacity to communicate a spirit of freedom. Whatever trace of the experience of founding remains imprinted on these personas acts as an icon to our capacity to begin. When Arendt selects exclusively for male founders it shapes this memory in particular ways. Ironically then, what her pantheon lacks is plurality. Turning to the female founders that haunt her political universe is one way to address that gap.

Female founders

This discussion addresses at least three and as many as seven female figures that are in some way tied to Arendt's work on founding. A precise count is difficult because, as will become apparent, these figures are defined by their fluidity, to the point where some show up as more than one personality while others could be collapsed into a single archetype like the “good wife.” These women are occasionally the central figures in the dramas of political beginning they inhabit. In other cases, their relationship to a male-dominated order provides the fulcrum of change. But in every case there is a certain constitutive strangeness to their story. They exceed the boundaries of their assigned or conventional identity in ways that mark them as uncanny or excessive, and their founding story is inevitably marked with violence.

Constitutive strangeness

How might the reintroduction of these female figures change our view of Arendtian beginning? Although she never addressed these figures herself, their stories illuminate critical elements of her thought. Taken in an Arendtian light, their lesson is not that women make shifty or self-destructive founders. It is that all politics has some defect at the start. The acts of founding they feature are unsettling, raising the “suspicion that political life is an aberration in nature” and “continually at risk from the vicissitudes of all things human” (Matthes Reference Matthes2000, 7). Because she must rise above her social context to become a fully fledged actor this vulnerability is especially apparent in the case of the female founder. Beginning renders the actor larger-than-life, signified in the gigantic and grotesque body of the Morrigan, the disturbing actions of Dido and Lucretia, or the extraordinary stature of Livia Augusta. This monstrousness is a reminder that being marginal, elusive or identity-shifting carries its own transformative energy. Like water caught behind a dam, such fluidity can deliver with awesome force.

Despite her apparent disinterest Arendt addressed the “woman problem” on at least one occasion. In her writings on Rahel Varnhagen she characterized it as “the discrepancy between what men expected of women ‘in general’ and what women could give or wanted in their turn” (Reference Arendt, Winston and Winston1974, xviii). This ever-present expectation gap suggests a deep failure of mutuality plagues the gendered landscape of political action. Women's absence from the ranks of founders in Arendt's writings might therefore reflect a general difficulty in remembering actions that the prevailing mentality already struggles to grasp. Remembering male beginners is a straightforward matter of turning to history or myth populated with the standard quotient of great men and their heroics. This recognizability makes them useful for Arendt's theorizing but tells only half the story. The other half appears as riddle and mystery.

The tendency to not only forget, but actively suppress, the disorienting strangeness of beginning may help explain why it has been assigned to the female side of a gender binary in the examples considered here. There's no reason a male figure couldn't evoke the same associations because what's being suppressed is what is paradoxical or perplexing about the actions of beginning. It's simply that women come to represent “that which must be banished or denied” in order for a “new normal” to be instituted (Matthes Reference Matthes2000, 3). While male founders are elevated to the public pedestal figures like Lucretia end entombed in the history they create. Both responses reflect the transition from the unstable and unsettling conditions of beginning back to ordinary time, just as the Morrigan's reversion to “good wife” marks the return to normalcy.

These examples show that peculiarity and ambiguity cannot be removed from political founding without suppressing something critical. If Arendtian beginning is understood as the special province of pre-anointed actors operating in a recognizable world and making promises and pacts in the old familiar way then the radical potential of her account is lost. What about those to whom no promises are offered? To whom no mutuality is extended, no seat at the table? Other relations remain available to these actors including resistance and refusal, testing or confrontation, canny misdirection, or outright violence. Even the death curses of Dido and Lucretia serve to change history although the price of such agency is steep. In a world where gender puts everyone in some form of relationship or another few bodies have the luxury of truly being pre-political and the appearance of rape in these stories reminds us that not all founding relations are happy or collaborative.

If as Arendt suggests, exiles and refugees are among the best ways to represent those who begin it's hard not to see marginality as a constitutive quality.Footnote ⁹ And if beginning is the work done in the strange in-between that springs up when normal time runs out, then Arendt's founding figures prove misleading. Because their pre-presence in the public sphere suggests action starts within this favored space. Female founders, on the other hand, show that it can equally well begin beyond it, suggesting a political world whose boundaries are disconcertingly elastic. For a thinker who did so much to turn our minds toward the perplexities of beginning Arendt's narrow account of founders endangers her own achievement. Politics is both more capacious and more extraordinary than a masculinized framework suggests.

Recalling the perplexities of beginning requires us to see past standard appearances. Yet Arendt seems to side with a view of beginning that initially acknowledges this difficulty only to cast it off in favor of a narrative that externalizes the strange and generative. In trying to account for how the “riddle of beginning” first appeared as feature of political life Arendt cited Virgil's characterization of the pre-Roman world as one that produces “all the wonders of nature” but “no tales worth telling.” Those who “sing” of that Saturnalian prehistory, she says, are “chanting of a fairy-tale land and are themselves marginal figures.” Dido's bard is among them, signaling that her story belongs to a pre-political order where the problems of ruling and authority are delightfully absent. This fairyland was thought of by Romans as being “beyond the scope of action” (Arendt Reference Arendt1971b, 2014–15), conveniently excluding figures like Dido and her Celtic counterparts from the ranks of beginner.

Lucretia and Livia Augusta arise not from misty prehistory however, but from the pre-political Roman household. Yet they too are assigned to a world beyond action and so disappear from Arendt's view. While their gender marks them as marginal and disempowered their role in transforming Roman history tells a different story. Could it be that the most transformative actions appear to come out of nowhere because the actor has been artificially disappeared from history? The riddle of foundation, under this scenario, arises from the challenge and shock of rediscovering that part of political life otherwise driven from view.Footnote ¹⁰ Both Kafka's He and Virgil's Aeneas show that the refusal to stay “defeated in defeat” is the very hallmark of beginning. In which case, marginalization disqualifies no one so long as fresh action is possible. Even consigned to the fairyland of prehistory or the pre-political household, there is no reason to count female figures out of political founding and very good reasons to count them in.

Expanding Arendtianism

This exercise shed light on the female founders at the margins of Arendtian theory in an effort to expand her work using her own conceptual tools. It takes the “rich and strange” lives that lie beneath her conventional sources as a resource for retheorizing the challenges of political birth. The familiar heroics of Arendt's Roman or American foundings harden the identities of its actors, embedding the formula for agency so firmly in a particular political order that its spirit of freedom drains away. Female founders, in contrast, inhabit a “no man's land” of the defeated, marginalized, and excluded. This makes them especially well placed to help us think about Arendtian beginning because they arise from the same mysterious and obscure depths as beginning itself. Arendt even names the phenomenon for one of them.

By the end of this exercise it's clear that femininity is not what powers the revolutionary agency of these figures; it's their capacity to become unwomanly. They inhabit and mobilize their identity while exceeding it in important ways. There is no need to recast Arendt as a feminist thinker then, so long as her work can be used to theorize the potency of gender without essentializing its bearers. Indeed, her neglect of the “woman problem” might signal a principled refusal to render legible a sphere of political action that is pre-emptively defined as incomprehensible and strange. Where this leaves figures like Varnhagen, Luxemburg, and Dinesen is less clear. Unlike their state-building brethren, their fate does make them wise and at a minimum they signal a potency or latency to be reckoned with. Perhaps they are like Aeneas’ excessive violence, a reminder that new worlds are often built at someone's expense.

If beginning makes the world unsettlingly strange, the Arendtian founder is someone who rises above their situation to see a world of possibility and then, with others, brings it to life. In Adriana Cavarero's terms they surge forth to become a body you cannot ignore and the plurality this introduces into the political world first appears as something incoherent or unknown. This “surging” into appearance—“this beginner's pride” as Cavarero puts it—is the true root of public happiness because it partakes of the growth and “germinal” creativity of natality (Reference Cavarero and Gervase2021, 12, 26, 37). This happiness is not limited to a gap in time and it's not just about the stabilizing work of promise-making or the constitutions that close the gap up again. It also involves the sometimes mind-bending work of growing the community within which such promises are even possible.

No one is excluded from this larger story because free action is available to all. In fact, as Virgil understood, those who begin from a place of diminished agency manifest the greatest narrative arc. Yet for all Cavarero's optimism, the cost to those who surge forth in this way should not be underestimated. The utopian quality she identifies in Arendt's work can spill over into denial if the violence and suffering of the beginner is not also acknowledged. If the best option we have for remembering beginning is to tell the stories of those who partake in it then female founders should be in that list, precisely because violence and suffering are never far from their story. Even their burial into the foundations of a new order can be seen as a kind of memory device. It reminds us that beginning can always emerge from the margins and may prove the most explosive when it does.